miller VS gron

jq and miller[1] are essential parts of my toolbelt, right up there with awk and vim.

[1]: https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

> This works really well if your problem can be solved in one or two liners.

My personal comfort threshold is around the 100-line mark. It's even possible to write maintainable shell scripts up to 500 lines, but it mostly depends on the problem you're trying to solve, and the discipline of the programmer to follow best practices (use sane defaults, ShellCheck, etc.).

> It go bad very quickly when, say, you have two CSV files and want to join them the sql-way.

In that case we're talking about structured data, and, yeah, Perl or Python would be easier to work with. That said, depending on the complexity of the CSV, you can still go a long way with plain Bash with IFS/read(1) or tr(1) to split CSV columns. This wouldn't be very robust, but there are tools that handle CSV specifically[1], which can be composed in a shell script just fine.

So it's always a balancing act of being productive quickly with a shell script, or reaching out for a programming language once the tools aren't a good fit, or maintenance becomes an issue.

[1]: https://miller.readthedocs.io/

where mlr is from https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

if this class of problems (i.e., csv/tsv data) is your main target you may find miller (https://github.com/johnkerl/miller) much more useful in the long run

That said, you may be interested in Miller (https://github.com/johnkerl/miller) which provides similar capabilities for CSV, JSON, and XML files. It doesn't use a SQL grammar, but that's just the proverbial lipstick on the thing. I'm not the author, but I have used it and I see some parallels in use cases at the very least.

worth giving Miller a shot

CSV utilities (still haven't pick a favorite one...): https://github.com/harelba/q https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv https://github.com/wireservice/csvkit https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

gron (https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron) to transform it and query and then invert the transformation?

It buffers all of its output statements in memory before writing to stdout:

https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron/blob/master/main.go#L204

Have you tried `gron`?

It converts your nested json into a line by line format which plays better with tools like `grep`

From the project's README:

▶ gron "https://api.github.com/repos/tomnomnom/gron/commits?per_page..." | fgrep "commit.author"

json[0].commit.author = {};

json[0].commit.author.date = "2016-07-02T10:51:21Z";

json[0].commit.author.email = "[email protected]";

json[0].commit.author.name = "Tom Hudson";

https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

It was suggested to me in HN comments on an article I wrote about `jq`, and I have found myself using it a lot in my day to day workflow

> So all I want is a tool to go from json => line oriented and I will do the rest with the vast library of experience I already have at transformations on the command line.*

The tool for that is likely https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

If JQ is too much, see GRON &| Miller

gron transforms JSON into discrete assignments to make it easier to grep for what you want https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

Miller is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for data formats such as CSV, TSV, JSON, JSON https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

And jless [1] and gron [2].

This is the first I'm hearing of gron, but adding here for completeness sake. Meanwhile, JSON seems to be becoming a standard for CLI tools. Ideal scenario would be if every CLI tool has a --json flag or something similar, so that jc is not needed anymore.

[1] https://jless.io/

[2] https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron